4pQonT

EZRA POUND 17
"The (mentally) sick were led into an experimental room. There,
under the surveillance of a German doctor, they were injected with a
new product intended to produce a shock in the nervous system. The
reactions were noticed with much care. While these experiments
were going on, our S.S. guards were eating and drinking in the German
medical director's office. I was able to rejoin my husband." 2
Psychiatrists comprise a fascinating group for future study in the
field of mental disorder. Dr. Overholser's predecessor at St. Elizabeths
had been shot dead by his wife while he was sitting in an
automobile with his mistress in front of a fashionable dress shop on
Washington's F Street. A few months later, a series of brutal
muggings and rapes, committed by employees of St. Elizabeths, had
moved a Washington editor to complain that the attendants should
be locked up at night with the patients, and that they should not
be allowed to come into the city.
When a creative personality falls into their clutches, the psychiatrists
run about like chickens in the shadow of the hawk's wing.
Pound's records were constantly being pawed by curious doctors
and attendants, and when, in 1949, a souvenir-hunter on the staff
absconded with a large part of his case history, the remainder of
the tattered file was placed in a safe. Dr. Overholser parries all inquiries
about it with the standard reply: "These are confidential
government papers, and cannot be shown to anyone."
John Flannagan wrote of his Bloomingdale experience, to his
friend Carl Zigrosser in December, 1934, "Psychiatric sophistry
finds I've been too interested in my work—it should have a less
dominant place in my life—and my life no longer seems my own." 3
It is a favorite theme of the psychiatrists, this notion that the
creative artist is a mentally-ill, compulsive manic-depressive with a
non-controllable personality disorder. He must be "adjusted". Once
he has been adjusted to society, he will no longer feel the urge to
write fine poetry or to create splendid music. Instead, he will settle
down to "normal" living; he will turn out knickknacks for the dime
stores or write verses for the community newspaper, as Pound was
asked to do at St. Elizabeths. The psychiatrist fears above all else
the healthy, cleansing effect of the creative personality upon society.
During Pound's imprisonment, American editorial writers were
carried away by an exhilarating sense of freedom whenever they